Justin nodded, although he wasn’t sure any of them had the skills to use a bow properly—especially without falling out of the tree in the process.
“All three teams are in the arena!” the Master of Ceremonies bellowed.
“Fuuuuuuck.” He wheezed as he and his teammate increased the pace. “I never liked track.”
The larger cache was a better find. There was a battle-ax in this one, although there were no water potions. He wondered if that had been deliberate. With no time to waste, he snatched the two daggers and shoved them through his belt before he bundled the remainder of the potions in his shirt. The two of them raced to the house.
Lyle emerged from the shadows under the stairs as they came into the building. They laid the items out on the floor and began a quick division. Justin chose the short sword, Lyle took one dagger as a backup for his fists, and Tina held a light-green potion up.
“Poison,” she read. “Damage over time. Should I use it or—”
“If you are struck full-on with a battle-ax, a damage over time debuff is kind of overkill,” he pointed out.
“Good point.” She rolled it at her companions.
He opted to give it to Lyle—if the dwarf needed to fall back to blades, it would give him a way to accelerate the fight before he could be further outflanked. For himself, he took the fire buff. Ever since his fight against the demon army, he’d enjoyed flaming blades.
“There are two rooms upstairs,” the dwarf said. “I say one of us stays in the shadow of the stairs, and the other two go upstairs.”
“Justin stays here,” Tina said. “He’s best equipped to take on a range of weaponry, right? He can call to tell us what’s coming. I’ll wait at the top of the stairs and eliminate as many as I can with a battle-ax—”
“What, and I get no one?” Lyle sounded deeply unimpressed.
“No,” she said patiently. “You man the window, tell us who’s coming, and back up the two of us as needed. You have a poison blade and can move between fights very effectively.”
“Hmmm.” He considered this and nodded. “Fine. But next time—”
“Yes, next time we’ll let you charge in yelling Stoooooout,” Justin promised. “Pinkie swear.”
“Eh?”
“Never mind. It’s not important.” He flashed a grin at Tina. “Positions, everyone.”
The three of them shared a fist-bump before Tina and Lyle ran up the stairs. It wasn’t long until the dwarf gave a low whistle followed by two thumps of his foot against the floor. Justin faded into the shadows and began to wish he hadn’t chosen the fire potion. The blade shone slightly and he wondered if someone would see it.
Their opponents circled the house once. He could hear their footsteps and see them pass the windows, but their shapes were faint through the thick, wavy glass and he was fairly sure they had no idea he was there. Upstairs, he heard a faint creak as Tina shifted slightly on the balls of her feet.
Only one came into the house, and he wished he knew whether or not they were alone or if the other one waited outside.
With a silent prayer that Tina would understand why he chose not to engage, he decided to remain in his hiding place. The person stopped inside the door and must have scanned the room before they strode forward to ascend the stairs. Their steps were sure and light-footed.
Whether she knew what he was going for or not, he didn’t know. Either way, she rose to the occasion. Their opponent—a man, judging by the voice—screamed followed by a crash.
One strike was all it had taken. He smiled.
The second team member had, in fact, waited outside the door. Now, he barreled in, yelling his team member’s name. His gaze was so focused on the top of the stairs that when Justin stepped out of the shadows, he had no way to stop in time.
The man was armed with daggers. Justin drove him back with a quick attack. He wished he had his sword, which had a longer range, but he still did better than he had with the daggers, and that was what counted.
Not only that, his opponent looked genuinely unnerved by the fact that he attacked with a flaming sword. He made a half-hearted attempt to fight, circled away, and tried to strike under his adversary’s range of motion, but he received a boot in his face for the trouble.
Justin hadn’t trained with Lyle for nothing.
As the man reeled back, he stamped hard, directly on his hand. He had a moment of guilt and wondered how injuries were healed there, but he was certain no one would let this man die. With a swift swipe, he opened a cut in the other man’s neck and wasn’t surprised, after his first match, to see the blue shield come up and immobilize the contestant.
Quickly, he slid into the shadows of his hiding place.
Out of the corner of his eye and through the wavy glass, he caught sight of movement. He gave a sharp whistle and only a few moments later, all three of the other team members reached the door. There was a tense, whispered discussion before they ran to the stairs as a group.
“Lyle!” Justin yelled. Tina would need backup, and there was precious little time for her to call for it.
The last team member up the stairs spun and when Justin stepped out of the shadows, she leapt the banister and attacked without hesitation.
From upstairs, shouts and pounding feet were very audible. It still sounded like there were four people moving around. He decided his warning had to be good enough and focused on his fight. There wasn’t another option because his opponent had a battle-ax, and he had the feeling that he stared into a future where Tina had more practice and was on the opposing side.
It was terrifying. The woman had swung immediately into the offensive as she came up from her crouch. Her eyes were narrowed and she fought single-mindedly. The battle-ax must have been what she trained with because she used it as if it were a piece of her own body. Muscles rippled in her arms while she parried his attacks.
Whether she simply put on a good show or she was freakishly strong, Justin didn’t know, but he did remember one other piece of his grandfather’s advice. The best time to end a fight was immediately—better a quick fight than a pretty one.
He launched into a counterattack of his own. Strength and stamina aside, the sheer weight of the battle-ax made its swings slower than his sword. They weren’t as slow as he would have liked but he had to work with what he had. He began to slash from one side, then the other, and from directly overhead, interspersed with direct thrusts of his short sword.
She was weaker on her right but with her right hand as her dominant one, she was better able to swing the ax to cover attacks on her left side. He leaned out of the way of a swing and danced back to give her an opening.
Unfortunately, she didn’t take it and instead, began to circle, panting now. Was she beginning to tire? That was interesting.
“You know, I have to say you’re getting fairly good at this.”
Justin was so shocked to hear words of praise from the AI that he froze and almost lost his head in an attack. “Did you do that on purpose?” he whispered.
“No, but that was hilarious.”
He groaned, crouched quickly, and spun on one foot. The ax whipped overhead and his opponent, dragged off-balance by the swing, tripped over him.
Upstairs, Lyle uttered a sudden below of pain and Tina screamed—and Justin went into autopilot. He had to get there. Conscious only of his friends’ predicament, he seized his opportunity and dove forward to tackle his adversary. She had tried to gain the momentum to lift the ax from the floor and he clamped one hand down over her wrist. He dragged the weapon out of her hand and hurled it against the far wall, and in the next minute, his knee pressed against her throat. Murder gleamed in her eyes, but she saw the sword within his reach and sighed. Her hands raised in surrender and she was encased in the blue magical shield.
Justin snatched both the sword and the battle-ax and sprinted up the stairs.
“Justin! Down!”
He reacted to Tina’s voice on instinct and dropped to his stom
ach as arrows whizzed overhead. “What’s going on?” he called.
“Remember that tree?” Her voice sounded choked. “The first team put their third person there. They shot Lyle in the back of the leg.”
“What?” He craned his head so he could see her. The dwarf was, indeed, frozen on the floor. His hand was clamped over one leg and Justin could see how much blood had flowed out of the wound even before he was frozen. Tina, meanwhile, was pressed up against the wall under the window.
He army-crawled to where she was.
“What now?” she asked him. “We can’t get near that tree and he won’t come in here, not when he only has a bow.”
As if in answer, huge numbers appeared in the sky—fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven…
“A stand-off has been established,” said the voice of the Master of Ceremonies. “With two members of Sephith’s Bane remaining and one member of Ulgutta, Sephith’s Bane will be declared the winner unless a fight is joined within the next minute.”
With a shout of anger, their opponent dropped out of the tree and raced to the house. He didn’t have much of a choice, although his odds weren’t good.
“This one’s mine,” Tina said furiously. She darted a glance at Lyle, and he remembered the way she had screamed. Seeing the dwarf shot had hit her hard and she was out for blood.
In the laboratory, Mary settled onto one of the stools and watched the monitors. She still couldn’t read the bulk of the output there but she could hear Justin and Tina’s voices—and she knew the girl was taking this particular fight.
Along with the danger.
“She was a good choice,” Amber said quietly.
She pressed her lips together and was surprised to feel a touch on her shoulder. When she looked up, she met Amber’s gaze.
“I know it was hard,” the young woman said so quietly that even she could barely hear her. “But you did the right thing.”
Mary felt something release in her chest and she smiled. “Thank you.”
Their opponent didn’t have a chance. He knew it and they knew it, but he had nothing to lose and he barreled up the stairs with a berserker roar. Tina’s ax thudded into the ground with splintering force directly in front of him.
He stopped so fast he tripped over it and she stepped out of the shadows with murder on her face.
“End it,” Justin whispered under his breath. “Don’t play with him and don’t try to get revenge. End it.”
She didn’t hear him. Entirely focused, she advanced on their opponent, who scuttled away on his back. Justin, who melted into the shadows in the room, noticed him fumble under the back of his shirt for something—a knife?
Fuck.
“Yeah,” Tina said. “Yeah, you have a knife. Do you think you’re gonna shank me, fucker? Well, you won’t. You’ll stand up and fight me one on one like you’re not a total coward. You got that?”
He stood, all six foot something of him, and Justin adjusted his hold on his sword. With one more step, he could end this. There was no way she could win a one on one fight with this man, not with daggers, and he would have to sit her down and talk to her about letting her emotions get in the way of what really mattered.
The man hadn’t fully drawn his dagger out when she attacked. One fist drove into his sternum, and she slashed with one of Lyle’s daggers with the other hand. Her opponent tumbled back with a scream, and she looked at her teammate.
“My grandfather taught me,” she said, “to make a big, dramatic speech, have them get ready for the fight, and then take them out while they were doing that.”
He burst out laughing. “I’ll never doubt you again, I promise.”
“Sephith’s Bane has won the match!” the Master of Ceremonies shouted. Cheering came from the stands and the friends looked outside before they hurried to Lyle’s side. Neither of them would leave before he was seen to.
The healers arrived soon. One had the lean, almost sinuous height that Justin could only guess came from elven blood. She readied a spell and touched a blue crystal orb to the dwarf’s shield. He collapsed and she immediately began to attend to the wound. Justin thought he saw her give a look of deep distaste at the man on the ground.
“He was really scared,” Tina said under her breath. “It bled so much even before the stasis field came up, Justin, and I think the guy planned it that way. Lyle might have died before they could shield him.”
His blood ran cold. The two companions accompanied the healers into the open air and made a show of waving to their fans, but he could only think of the possibility of Lyle bleeding out—or Tina, or himself. He hadn’t thought that was a possibility, but he began to wonder if he should have looked at the history of the tournament more carefully.
And he’d reached a point where he thought people couldn’t stoop any lower.
On the dais, the Master of Ceremonies greeted them with an expansive smile. “You are fast becoming a crowd favorite,” he said heartily, and the spectators cheered wildly. “Should I even ask which you prefer to take?”
He would have smiled in return but for the look on Lyle’s face. He knelt next to the stretcher. “Hey,” he said quietly. “You’ll be okay, you know that, right?”
“I do.” The dwarf’s voice was faint. He was pale but Justin knew that was from nerves and not blood loss. He looked at the young man and there was a gravity in his face that Justin had never seen before. Even facing Sephith, even locked in jail, Lyle had been reckless and unimpressed by the threats before him.
This had struck him differently.
“I’ve been away too long,” he said quietly. “I never said a proper goodbye to my family.” His smile was forced. “I don’ want to leave ye without a team—”
“Go,” he said quietly. Something in him ached. The third key would send him home, he was sure of it now. The game was slowly taking away the people he had come to rely on and he would soon return to his own life.
Had it only been a few weeks in this world? It seemed like so much longer.
“Hey.” Lyle caught his arm. “Take the advantage.”
“No way,” he said firmly. “If you’re going home and I can’t buy you an ale in person, I’ll damned well send you with money so I can buy you some from a distance.”
The dwarf managed a laugh as Justin stood. He caught Tina’s nod as well as the suspicious glint of tears in her eyes. She looked away and pretended to study the crowd. He had the sense that she didn’t like to cry in front of people.
“We take the payout,” he told the Master of Ceremonies.
The man’s smile fell slightly. “Don’t tell me you’ll bow out.”
“Let him wonder,” the AI said suddenly.
Justin only had a split-second to make his decision and with an internal sigh, he decided to go with the AI’s suggestion. He shrugged. “We’ll have to see.”
He and Tina raised the bowl over their heads to the sound of cheers and left the Master of Ceremonies staring after them, stricken.
“So, why did I do that?” Justin asked the AI in an undertone.
“You’ll have to wait and see, won’t you?” The AI sounded as smug as usual. “Maybe I made you do it for shits and giggles.”
He rolled his eyes.
Chapter Seventy-Six
Tina was waiting on the back patio of the inn when Justin came downstairs. Having nothing other than burlap and armor, she had borrowed something from the innkeeper’s wife—a flowing linen robe she had belted incongruously with her dagger belt. She saw him looking and threw her hands up.
“I know I look ridiculous but I couldn’t stand the armor for one more minute.”
“You look…really good.” He cleared his throat. With her hair still wet from the bath and curling as it dried, she looked surprisingly…elegant, which wasn’t a word he ever thought he’d use for her.
He cleared his throat as he gestured to the table nearby. “Food? I don’t know about you but I’m starving.”
“Me, too.” Ti
na went to sit and it took a little time to make sure the robe didn’t gape in any unexpected ways. “The innkeeper said he’d be out with food soon. I hope you don’t mind, I…uh, splurged a little.”
“Well, we have a ton of money and it’s not like we’ll stick around very long.” Justin grinned at her. “I say we go all out. Maybe this isn’t the best place to do that—”
“I won’t go anywhere else in this getup,” she said at once.
“You know you look good, right? Not that I’m surprised. You always look good—I mean, you seemed surprised that…oh, I’m awful at this.” He let his head thud onto the table.
She laughed. “Thank you. I know what you meant.” A door opened nearby and she clapped enthusiastically. “Oh, thank you so much.”
“Of course.” The innkeeper approached, bearing a jug of wine and glasses as well as a loaf of freshly baked bread. “Sir, are you well?” He looked at where Justin still huddled with his head on the table.
“Yes, thank you.” He raised his head, embarrassed all over again. “Could I ask you to take some refreshments to our friend in the corner room?”
“Rest assured, we were already doing so.” The man nodded at Tina. “The lady requested that we give him the very finest food. Of course, he has since requested that we take it away and replace it with something heartier.”
Tina hid her face with one hand and her shoulders shook in a silent laugh. “I should have expected that. Ale and…what, potatoes?”
“And sausages,” the innkeeper agreed. “My wife is pleased. She takes great pride in her ale.”
“Oh. Well, then.” She smiled. “Thank you for this. I’m sure we’ll enjoy whatever you have.”
“We’ve taken the liberty of making a meal specially for you,” he told the two of them. “And you’ll have the patio to yourselves.”
“There’s no need for that,” Justin protested.
“You’re not used to being a tournament champion, are you?” The innkeeper gave him an amused look. “If I let anyone else out here, you wouldn’t have a moment of peace all night.”
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